welcome

Take your ears for a gallop beyond the stagnant pond of good taste and into the lush, dewy meadows of Ponytone.

Sound files are available for approximately 7 days. We often reactivate files from the archives, however, so we encourage you to explore. Our mixes are available every day except Christmas. If you are a copyright holder and want us to remove something, let us know and we'll do so immediately.

flashback

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Doru Danciu, the orchestrator and conductor of this Romanian library record, had very high hopes for this particular collection of music. His dream, though he wouldn't admit it to anyone but his grandmother, was to have the songs included in the film Perfect, which was currently in production in Los Angeles. There were rumors filtering through the Iron Curtain that the movie was about an aerobics instructor, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, and that most of it would take place in a swanky L.A. health club with John Travolta's sock-stuffed crotch doing a never-ending series of pelvic thrusts to a shiny dance beat. Doru's close friend Mihai, a Romanian Securitate agent with the inside scoop on everything censored from the West, revealed that eventually John and Jamie Lee would work up a sweat in the bedroom too. Doru wrote a song specifically for that plot development. He even added an invigorating Olympic Theme just in case one of characters reached the highest level of competitive aerobics at some point in the story. Basically he included everything a filmmaker could possibly need for a movie about aerobics, and he was convinced that the director, James Bridges, and the music supervisor, Becky Mancuso, would find his music just...perfect. Upon completion, Doru FreighterExed a copy of the album to Columbia Studios, and then for five long months he and his grandma sat huddled together with their fingers crossed in the cramped offices of Electrecord Records.

One can only imagine Doru's shock and disappointment when his friend Mihai finally managed to smuggle a bootleg betamax copy of the finished movie back to Romania, and he watched John Travolta thrusting his pelvis to this!

As a footnote, the weirdest thing about this record is that smack-dab in the middle of all this aerobic "library" music is an utterly horrifying cover of "Who's Holding Donna Now" (please sign our release form before listening at your own risk). But still, what a wonderful surprise to run into the Debarge family deep within the stacks of the National Library in Bucharest!